The first time Kaelan Thorne saw into someone else's mind, he was seventeen years old and failing his psychology class.
It happened during Dr. Martinez's lecture on cognitive dissonance, a particularly dry Thursday afternoon when the rain hammered against the windows of Meridian High School like desperate fingers seeking entry. Kaelan had been staring at the back of Sarah Chen's head, wondering if she'd noticed the strange dreams he'd been having about her, when suddenly the world tilted sideways.
One moment he was looking at her perfectly styled black hair, the next he was somewhere else entirely—inside a vast, dimly lit space that hummed with an energy he couldn't name. The air tasted of copper and electricity, and in the distance, he could hear the sound of his own heartbeat echoing like thunder in a canyon.
"Fear," whispered a voice that wasn't quite his own. "She's afraid."
Kaelan found himself standing in what looked like a library constructed from crystallized thoughts. The shelves stretched impossibly high, filled with books that shifted and changed their titles as he watched. Some glowed with warm, golden light—happy memories, he somehow knew—while others pulsed with deep purples and blacks, their covers seeming to absorb light rather than reflect it.
He moved forward, his footsteps silent on the floor that appeared to be made of polished obsidian. Each step revealed new details: photographs floating like butterflies between the shelves, showing moments from a life he'd never lived but somehow recognized. A little girl with Sarah's face, crying over a broken doll. The same girl, older now, standing in the shadow of two adults whose faces were blurred beyond recognition, their voices raised in anger that seemed to make the very air tremble.
"You shouldn't be here," came another voice, this one sharper, more frightened. It was Sarah's voice, but it seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once.
Kaelan spun around, searching for the source, but found himself face to face with a mirror that hadn't been there moments before. His reflection looked back at him, but something was wrong. His eyes—normally a boring brown—were now shot through with veins of silver that pulsed with their own inner light. As he watched, the silver spread, creeping across his irises like frost on a window.
"What's happening to me?" he whispered to his reflection.
The mirror-Kaelan smiled, but it wasn't a pleasant expression. "You're awakening," it said. "The question is, are you ready for what comes next?"
Before Kaelan could respond, the library began to shake. Books tumbled from their shelves, their pages scattering like snow, each one bearing fragments of memories and emotions that weren't his own. The floating photographs burst into flames, their subjects screaming silently as they were consumed. The golden light that had warmed the space began to dim, replaced by a creeping darkness that seemed to have weight and malevolence.
"Get out!" Sarah's voice screamed from all around him. "GET OUT!"
Kaelan stumbled backward, but there was nowhere to go. The darkness was closing in, and within it, he could see shapes moving—things that definitely weren't human, with eyes like dying stars and mouths full of teeth that looked suspiciously like broken promises.
He tried to run, but his feet felt like they were moving through molasses. The creatures in the darkness were getting closer, and he could hear them whispering in voices that sounded like his own thoughts turned inside out.
"You opened the door," they hissed. "Now you have to pay the price."
"Kaelan Thorne!"
The sharp crack of Dr. Martinez's voice hit him like a physical blow, and suddenly he was back in the classroom, gasping and drenched in sweat. Every eye in the room was on him, including Sarah's, and the expression on her face made his blood run cold. She looked terrified—not confused or annoyed like he might have expected, but genuinely, bone-deep terrified, as if she'd just seen her worst nightmare made flesh.
"I asked you a question, Mr. Thorne," Dr. Martinez continued, his tone suggesting this wasn't the first time he'd tried to get Kaelan's attention. "Perhaps you'd like to share with the class what cognitive dissonance means to you?"
Kaelan's mouth was dry as dust. He could still taste the copper and electricity from... wherever he'd been. "I..." he started, then stopped. How could he possibly explain what had just happened? How could he tell them that he'd somehow been inside Sarah's mind, walking through her memories like a tourist in a museum of trauma?
"It's when someone holds two contradictory beliefs at the same time," he finally managed, the textbook definition falling from his lips automatically. "Like believing you're a good person while doing something you know is wrong."
Dr. Martinez nodded approvingly, but Kaelan barely heard the praise. His attention was fixed on Sarah, who had turned to face him fully now. Her dark eyes were wide with something that might have been recognition, and when she mouthed a single word at him, he felt his heart stop.
"Impossible," she whispered, her voice barely audible over the sound of his own pulse thundering in his ears.
The rest of the class passed in a blur. Kaelan sat frozen in his chair, acutely aware of the way Sarah kept glancing back at him, her fear slowly giving way to something that might have been curiosity. When the bell finally rang, he gathered his things with hands that shook slightly and made his way toward the door, hoping to escape before—
"Kaelan."
He turned to find Sarah standing just behind him, her usual confident demeanor replaced by something fragile and uncertain. Up close, he could see the fine lines of stress around her eyes, the way she held herself as if expecting a blow. It matched perfectly with the memories he'd seen in that impossible library.
"We need to talk," she said quietly. "After school. The old observatory behind the science building."
Before he could respond, she was gone, swept away by the tide of students moving to their next class. Kaelan stood there for a long moment, staring at the space where she'd been, trying to process what had just happened.
The old observatory. He knew the place—a small, neglected building that had been used for astronomy classes decades ago, before the school had gotten newer equipment. These days, it was mostly forgotten, which made it perfect for conversations that couldn't happen anywhere else.
As he made his way to his next class, Kaelan found himself analyzing his own mental state with the clinical detachment that had always come naturally to him. Hallucination was the most logical explanation. Stress, lack of sleep, too much caffeine—any number of factors could have caused his brain to construct an elaborate fantasy. The fact that Sarah seemed to have experienced something too was probably just coincidence, or maybe he was reading more into her reaction than was actually there.
But even as he tried to rationalize what had happened, a part of him knew better. The silver veins in his reflected eyes had been too vivid, too specific to be a simple hallucination. And the voice that had whispered "You're awakening"—that hadn't sounded like his own subconscious talking.
It had sounded like something else entirely. Something that knew him better than he knew himself.
The rest of the day crawled by with agonizing slowness. Kaelan sat through classes on calculus and American history, but his mind was elsewhere, turning over every detail of his experience in Sarah's mental landscape. He found himself studying his classmates with new eyes, wondering what secrets their minds might hold, what memories and fears lay hidden beneath their carefully constructed facades.
During lunch, he sat alone at his usual table in the corner of the cafeteria, picking at a sandwich he had no appetite for. The noise of hundreds of conversations washed over him like static, but underneath it, he thought he could hear something else—whispers at the very edge of perception, fragments of thoughts that weren't his own.
...can't believe she said that...
...failed the test for sure...
...parents are going to kill me...
...wish I was brave enough to...
Kaelan shook his head sharply, trying to clear the phantom voices. Stress, he told himself firmly. Just stress and an overactive imagination. But the whispers didn't stop, and by the time the final bell rang, he was beginning to wonder if he was losing his mind.
The walk to the old observatory felt longer than it should have. The October air was crisp with the promise of winter, and the setting sun painted the sky in shades of orange and red that reminded him uncomfortably of the burning photographs in Sarah's mental library. By the time he reached the small, ivy-covered building, his nerves were stretched to the breaking point.
Sarah was already there, sitting on the steps with her arms wrapped around her knees. She looked up as he approached, and in the fading light, her face looked pale and strained.
"You saw it, didn't you?" she said without preamble. "The library. The memories."
Kaelan stopped walking. "How did you—"
"Because I felt you there," she interrupted. "In my head, walking around like you owned the place. Do you have any idea how violating that was?"
The accusation hit him like a slap. "I didn't mean to," he said quickly. "I don't even know how it happened. One second I was sitting in class, the next I was... somewhere else."
Sarah studied his face for a long moment, and some of the anger faded from her expression. "You really don't know, do you? You have no idea what you are."
"What I am?" Kaelan moved closer, settling onto the steps beside her, careful to leave enough space that she wouldn't feel crowded. "What's that supposed to mean?"
Instead of answering directly, Sarah reached into her backpack and pulled out a leather-bound journal. The cover was worn smooth with age, and when she opened it, Kaelan could see pages covered in dense handwriting interspersed with diagrams and symbols he didn't recognize.
"This belonged to my grandmother," she said quietly. "She died when I was twelve, but before she passed, she told me stories. About people who could do things with their minds that shouldn't be possible. She called them 'Walkers'—people who could step into the landscape of consciousness itself."
Kaelan felt his mouth go dry. "That's impossible. Human consciousness is just electrical impulses in the brain. There's no physical space to walk through."
Sarah gave him a look that was part pity, part exasperation. "Is that what you tell yourself when you hear other people's thoughts? When you feel their emotions bleeding into your own? Because I've been watching you, Kaelan. I've seen the way you flinch when someone's upset, even when they're trying to hide it. I've seen you answer questions before they're fully asked."
The truth of her words hit him like a physical blow. How many times had he known things he shouldn't know, felt things that weren't his to feel? He'd always attributed it to intuition, to being naturally empathetic, but now...
"The dreams," he whispered, more to himself than to her. "I've been having these dreams where I'm in places that feel real but can't be real. Landscapes made of thoughts and memories."
"The Mindscape," Sarah said, nodding. "That's what my grandmother called it. The collective unconscious given form and structure. She said that Walkers could navigate it like explorers in uncharted territory, but it was dangerous. There are things in the deep parts of the Mindscape that don't want to be found."
Kaelan thought of the creatures he'd seen in the darkness, with their dying-star eyes and broken-promise teeth. "What kind of things?"
"Parasites," Sarah said, her voice dropping to barely above a whisper. "Entities that feed on human consciousness, on fear and pain and despair. My grandmother called them the Hollow Ones. She said they've been trying to break through into our world for centuries, using the Mindscape as a bridge."
The words sent a chill down Kaelan's spine. "And you think I'm some kind of... what, psychic explorer?"
"I think you're something more than that," Sarah replied, turning to face him fully. "The way you moved through my memories, the ease with which you navigated my mental space—I've never heard of a Walker with that kind of natural ability. Most of them need years of training just to make contact with another person's consciousness."
Kaelan stared at her, trying to process everything she was telling him. It sounded insane, like the plot of a bad science fiction movie, but he couldn't deny the evidence of his own experience. The library had been real—maybe not in any conventional sense, but real nonetheless.
"Why are you telling me this?" he asked finally. "Why not just avoid me, pretend it never happened?"
Sarah's expression grew grim. "Because I don't think we have that luxury. The dreams you mentioned—they're getting stronger, aren't they? More vivid, more frequent?"
Kaelan nodded reluctantly. It was true. What had started as occasional strange dreams had become an almost nightly occurrence. Sometimes he woke up feeling like he'd been walking for hours, his feet sore and his clothes damp with sweat.
"That's not a coincidence," Sarah continued. "According to my grandmother's journal, there are signs that something big is coming. The barriers between the Mindscape and the physical world are weakening. People with abilities like yours are manifesting earlier and stronger than they should be."
"What kind of signs?"
Sarah flipped through the journal until she found a particular page, then held it out for him to see. The handwriting was spidery and faded, but Kaelan could make out references to "reality fractures" and "consciousness bleeds" and something called "the Convergence."
"People disappearing," Sarah read aloud. "But not just physically—mentally. Their bodies are found, but their minds are gone, leaving behind empty shells. Increased reports of shared dreams, telepathic experiences, and reality distortions. The appearance of Walkers with unprecedented abilities."
Kaelan felt his heart rate spike. "Has that been happening here? People disappearing like that?"
"Three so far," Sarah said quietly. "All teenagers, all found in public places with no memory of who or where they were. The authorities are calling it a new kind of dissociative disorder, but the symptoms don't match anything in the psychiatric literature."
The weight of what she was telling him settled over Kaelan like a lead blanket. If she was right, if he really was some kind of psychic navigator, then the strange things happening to him weren't just personal quirks—they were symptoms of something much larger and more dangerous.
"What am I supposed to do with this information?" he asked. "I don't know how to control whatever's happening to me. I don't even understand it."
Sarah closed the journal and met his eyes. "We learn," she said simply. "Together. My grandmother's notes mention other resources, other people who might be able to help. But we have to be careful. If the Hollow Ones are really trying to break through, then anyone with abilities like yours is going to be a target."
As if summoned by her words, a wave of dizziness washed over Kaelan. The world around him seemed to flicker, like a movie projector skipping frames, and for just a moment, he could see through the facade of normal reality to something else underneath—a vast, dark space filled with the sound of whispers and the smell of decay.
"Did you see that?" he gasped, gripping the stone steps to steady himself.
Sarah's face had gone white. "The overlay," she whispered. "It's starting."
"What's starting?"
But before she could answer, the moment passed, and the world snapped back to its normal, mundane appearance. The sun had finished setting while they talked, and the first stars were beginning to appear in the darkening sky.
"We need to go," Sarah said, standing up quickly. "It's not safe to be out here after dark, not with the barriers weakening."
They walked back toward the main school building in silence, both lost in their own thoughts. As they reached the parking lot where Sarah's car waited, she turned to him one final time.
"Meet me tomorrow," she said. "Before school. There's someone I think you need to talk to."
"Who?"
"Dr. Elena Vasquez. She teaches at the university, but she's also the only person I know who might be able to explain what's happening to you. What's happening to all of us."
Kaelan nodded, not trusting himself to speak. The weight of everything he'd learned was pressing down on him, making it hard to breathe. As he watched Sarah drive away, her taillights disappearing into the darkness, he found himself wondering if his life would ever be normal again.
The answer, he suspected, was no.
Walking home through the quiet suburban streets, Kaelan tried to make sense of everything Sarah had told him. Walkers, the Mindscape, Hollow Ones—it all sounded like elaborate fantasy, but he couldn't shake the memory of that impossible library, or the voice that had told him he was awakening.
As he turned onto his street, he noticed something odd. The streetlights seemed dimmer than usual, their yellow glow flickering and unstable. The shadows between them were deeper, more substantial, as if they had weight and substance of their own.
And in those shadows, Kaelan could swear he saw movement.
He quickened his pace, telling himself it was just his imagination running wild after Sarah's revelations. But the feeling of being watched persisted, and by the time he reached his front door, he was practically running.
Safe inside his house, with the lights on and the door locked behind him, Kaelan tried to convince himself that everything was fine. His parents were at their weekly book club meeting, so the house was quiet except for the familiar sounds of the refrigerator humming and the old pipes settling. Normal sounds. Comforting sounds.
He made himself a sandwich and sat at the kitchen table, trying to focus on mundane things like homework and weekend plans. But his mind kept drifting back to the silver veins he'd seen in his reflected eyes, to the whispered voices at lunch, to the way reality had flickered around him like a faulty television signal.
When he finally went to bed that night, Kaelan lay awake for hours, staring at the ceiling and listening for sounds that shouldn't be there. Several times, he thought he heard whispers just at the edge of perception, but when he held his breath and strained to listen, there was only silence.
Eventually, exhaustion won out over anxiety, and he drifted off to sleep. But even in his dreams, he couldn't escape the feeling that something fundamental had changed. The rules of reality that he'd always taken for granted were no longer as solid as they'd seemed.
And somewhere in the darkness of his sleeping mind, something was waiting for him to find his way back to that impossible library, where the books held memories that weren't his own and the shadows moved with malevolent purpose.
The awakening had begun, and there was no going back.